City of Veils (45 page)

On top of that, he couldn’t stop thinking about Katya. Had she told Osama directly—“Nayir is my husband”—or had Osama simply inferred it? Did she tell the administration that she was married, or had they assumed it because she wore an engagement ring? He tried to forgive her by imagining that she hadn’t intended to lie to anyone, and that she wore the ring only out of nostalgia for Othman, but that thought only made him feel worse.

After eating, he went to the bathroom and performed his ablutions, grateful for the respite. The minute he finished, his cell phone rang. He nearly switched it off, but saw that it was Osama.

“Did Mrs. Walker show up at your boat?” he asked by way of greeting.

“No,” Nayir said. “She hasn’t contacted my uncle either.”

“Same thing over here. I called her neighbors again, and they haven’t seen her. I have a bad feeling about this.”

“I do, too.”

“We got in touch with the police in the desert. It’s near Qaryat al-Faw,” Osama said. “I gave them the coordinates. They said they’d send someone to check it out.”

“How long do you think it will take?”

Osama snorted. “I’m not going to wait up for it,” he said and hung up.

Nayir returned to the bathroom hoping to regain the fragile state of purity and calm he’d established. A second round of ablutions didn’t help. By the time he knelt on his prayer rug, he was actively struggling to keep his mind in order. After the second
rakat
, he gave up fighting and simply prayed for her safety:…
and wherever she is, Allah, please let her think to call me.

N
ayir woke with a start in the quiet hours of the night. He hadn’t been dreaming. He hadn’t heard a noise. Instead, it felt as if all of the anxiety of the day had wound itself up so tightly inside him that it had finally popped. Of the many burdens the past week had heaped on his shoulders, the one that seemed most grotesque in the moonlight was the juvenile, harshly stated opinion that Majdi had expressed that day in the lab.
If you have a rigid interpretation… it reduces… something flat… it can’t keep up anymore… just an ornament
. He had been talking about the Quran, but now it felt as if he had been talking about Nayir, about men like Nayir, about a good portion of society, and that Majdi had taken everything Nayir held dear and crushed it between the pitiless stones of logic and progress.

Without really stopping to consider why, Nayir found himself getting dressed and slipping on his hiking boots. He packed his necessities—headscarf, binoculars, favorite canteen, and an Altoids tin filled with emergency survival tools like matches and a needle and thread—and took them out to the car. In the parking lot, he hauled his largest gasoline and water drums from the trunk of the Jeep and transferred them to the Rover. Ten minutes later he was on the road.

O
sama sat at the kitchen table watching Nuha boil the coffee. He tried to recover the feeling he’d had on the phone: that everything was going to be all right. But for the first time in his life, he felt that the kitchen was a foreign place, that the whole house belonged to someone else.

Nuha brought the coffee to the table and set it down. There were tears in her eyes, and that was the biggest part of his discomfort. She’d started crying softly the moment he’d walked in the door. He had hugged her, kissed her forehead, led her into the kitchen. He was exhausted, but suddenly the fatigue had burned off in a pulse of adrenaline, and now he was nervous.

He reached over and took her hand. “Nuha,
hayati,
we’re going to be all right.”

She had been staring at his chest, but now she shut her eyes and slowly withdrew her hand from his. “There are some other things I have to tell you,” she said. The words dropped in him like an anchor.

“Go ahead,” he managed. “I’m listening.” Part of him felt he couldn’t listen anymore. This wasn’t an interrogation room; he wouldn’t bring that crap here. But she began to talk, her voice soft, her head held low. She told him all the things she had wanted to confess before but had been afraid to say. How she spent their money frivolously on clothes and lunches with friends, then borrowed more from her parents so that he would never know how much she spent. How she didn’t actually like the Indian restaurant they went to, the one he loved so much. The food there made her sick. Sometimes she would come home and throw up. And all those Wednesday nights when he thought she was visiting her cousins? She was actually out in the desert with her brother, learning to drive. “Of course I couldn’t tell you,” she said. “You’re a cop. I didn’t want to put you in that position, knowing that your wife was breaking the law.” He didn’t hear everything. It all went by in a blur as he waited for her to tell him the one thing he couldn’t forgive: that she’d met someone else, that she’d fallen in love with another man. But she never got there. She stopped talking and looked at him. Obviously his lack of reaction was frightening her.

“Thank you for telling me” was all he could manage.

She went on. The anchor was pulling him ever deeper; he was floundering in her confession. Now she was saying that she didn’t actually like being a mother. Muhannad was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to her, of course, but all the work, the worry, the strain of parenting, was too much. She couldn’t focus, her mind was always on her career. It wasn’t fair to Muhannad when all she could think about was her writing.

“That’s what I really care about,” she said.

“It’s important,” he responded numbly.

She nodded, took a deep breath, and forged ahead. “This has all been a horrible few days, Osama. I’ve hated keeping these secrets from you, and I hate that you found the pills. But I think in the end, it has been a good thing, because I’ve come to a decision. I have to tell you what’s really in my heart.” She wouldn’t meet his eye, but when she pushed ahead, he saw the determination in her face. “I’ve decided,” she said, “that I don’t want to have any more children.”

It took him a moment to register the weight of her statement. He felt something breaking inside him as he remembered the conversations about children they’d had over the past three years, the times they’d lain in bed picking baby names, discussing how they would handle sibling rivalry, how they’d have to buy a bigger car. It had all been a lie.

“But you… Nuha…” He forced a grim smile. “You’re twenty-three. You’ve got a long life ahead of you. You shouldn’t make a dramatic decision like this. You might change your mind.”

She didn’t dispute it, but the look on her face told him everything. She wasn’t going to change her mind. And the fresh tears in her eyes told him exactly how sorry she was.

Osama sat back. All he could think was that his son would never have siblings. He tried to imagine himself today without his brothers and sisters, and the image was pitiful. It flashed in front of him in an instant: how lonely his life would have been. He saw his son alone. Then it occurred to him that Muhannad wouldn’t have parents either. They’d both be working. They’d spend their lives working. They might even be divorced.
Divorce
—the word was like a rock thudding on the floor. He would have to remarry if he wanted more kids; he didn’t believe in taking a second wife. Nuha would never put up with it anyway. He couldn’t imagine even finding one.

“Osama?” She was looking worried.

“I need some time,” he said. He resisted the urge to leave her there, to stand up coldly and stalk off. He wasn’t going to follow that instinct anymore; it had done too much damage already. So instead he just sat there, unable to speak.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He nodded. He let a few more minutes go by before reaching for her hand and squeezing it. He stood up, bending down to lay a kiss on her forehead. The familiar smell of her hair nearly brought him to his knees. He ignored it. Looking at her one more time, he repeated what he’d said. “I need some time.”

M
iriam?”

A groan.

“Miriam? Can you hear me?”

Another groan.

“Wake up.”

She struggled to open her eyes, but her lids were as heavy as bricks. Her head was throbbing painfully where she’d been struck. The rest of her body was numb. It begged her to return to unconsciousness as the harsh voice continued prodding.

“Miriam.”

She had thought it was Eric, but the voice was all wrong. Too guttural, too deep. She tried to respond. It felt as if the inside of her mouth had been caulked.

There was a clatter nearby. Her eyelashes fluttered and she took a deep breath. A musty smell hit her throat and she gagged. Coughed.

“Eric?”

“Eric’s not here.” This time the voice was a hot whisper in her ear. “But you’ll see him soon.” A hand crawled beneath the back of her neck and raised her head. She tried to open her eyes again, but the lamp at her foot was too bright. The man was lifting her, propping her upright against something warm and hard.

Her head felt full of sand, and every movement sent it shifting like grains in an hourglass. She became aware of her body part by part. Her arms were twisted behind her back, tied tightly at the wrists. Her hands were asleep. The numbness was somehow painful.

“You need to drink this.” The man was nudging something into her mouth. A drop of water touched her lips. She forced them open, began to drink. The liquid went down her throat burning like whiskey.

“Who are you?”

“Keep drinking.”

She had to shut her eyes to focus on the water, but it felt good now. She was thirsty.

“Who are you?”

He didn’t answer. She opened her eyes. Somewhere along the way she’d lost a contact lens, and now all she could see was a blurry picture, nothing but darkness beyond the single lamp that rested on an end table at the foot of a bed. She flailed but only managed to fall on her side. Her head hit the mattress, causing some commotion from her captor, who leaned over and set her upright again. She tried to remember where she was, but all she could recall was the street, the two African men, Mabus’s house —

“Mabus?” she croaked.

A figure moved past the lamplight, a man wearing a white shirt that shimmered at the edges of the light. He moved back into the darkness.

Black thoughts filled her head—not panic, but a distant awareness of his intention, mingled with despair. She was too weak to fight. She was exhausted, starving, aching all over. There was darkness beyond the lamp, the swell of midnight over the room. She was powerless.

“Miriam, he told you everything, didn’t he?” he asked. His voice was soothing, American, like the voice of a father who wanted to know that his daughter had been lying, a father who wanted the truth.

“Eric?” she slurred, trying to buy herself some time, to make Mabus believe she was incoherent, because this was Mabus, she was sure of it now. Where was the memory card? It had been in her purse. No, she had left it at Samir’s house.

A long silence followed, broken by the sound of Mabus setting a glass on a table. She heard him breathing.

“Eric?”

“Eric isn’t here.”

She opened her eyes and fought the grinding in her head. Mabus paced the darkness behind the lamp like a wildcat. She could feel his frustration.

She wanted to hurt him, bite him, scream from the pit of her stomach, but the most she could manage was to sit up straighter and force her eyes to focus.

“Miriam, where’s the memory card?”

She looked around the room. Shadows played on one wall. There was a recliner chair, the ugly wallpaper of a shabby hotel. Where was the door?

“I don’t know,” she said groggily.

“Think.” His voice was edged with anger.
“The memory card.”

His exasperated sigh frightened her more than anything else. A bounce. He knelt on the bed, his hands gripping her shoulders. “Try to remember,” he hissed. “Did you give it to someone?”

She tried not to inhale his scent—it was making her gag—but she had to breathe. She fluttered her eyelids as if she were half dead and slumped to the side. He gripped her more tightly, yanked her back upright, and pushed her hard into the wall. The pain in her wrists was almost unbearable.

Adrenaline was waking her, making it more difficult to play dead. His hand gripped her neck; he put his face close to hers.

“Where is the card?”

“I don’t know.” She was whimpering. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Crack.
His palm was like a steel bar slamming her cheek. The other hand gripping her neck was pressing tighter. She could feel the air thinning, feel her chest convulsing as she struggled to breathe.
“You gave it to the police, didn’t you?”

“No,” she said, choking.

He smacked her again. “Tell me!”

She couldn’t breathe. “Okay,” she gasped. He released her neck ever so slightly. She realized she was crying. “They came looking for you,” she wheezed.

“And what did you tell them?”

“Noth—” She saw him raise his hand. “I didn’t tell them anything. I just gave them your address.”

“And where is the card?”

“I gave it to the police.”